Ulisses XXVI (short film - 15 min) - screening

Panel fedeli d’Amore (Love’s faithful)

with Ermanna Montanari, Marco Martinelli, Frank Hentscker

fedeli d’Amore (Love's faithful) is the new stage poem by Marco Martinelli focused on the exceptional vocal research of Ermanna Montanari (awarded “2018 best Italian actress” for this performance). The text revolving around Dante and our own present times, has been selected by Italian and American Playwright Project curated by Valeria Orani and Frank Hentschker and published by PAJ (Performing Arts Journal) Publications directed by Bonnie Marranca

About ULYSSES XXVI (director’s note)

As we began developing the idea for this film, Ermanna and I asked ourselves, “What voice would Dante’s Ulysses have?” A Ulysses more “gothic” than Homeric emerges from the pages of the Divine Comedy. Could we really hear his voice of fire, filtered through the maelstrom of preaching and popular legend? And if his voice is the “murmuring” of a flame, as Dante describes it, what voice does that flame have? Sometimes the questions we ask at the beginning of a project find no immediate answers, but it turns out that the making of the work shows us the way. Like Bruno Munari said, “If I make, I understand.” Given the many years we have spent with Dante and his work, we gladly accepted Adl’s proposal that we produce a short film about Canto XXVI of the Inferno, to be screened at the conference “Dante and Other Classics: from Petrarch to Wole Soyinka”, which took place April 28 & 29, 2021.

Some months before, on the suggestion of our architect friends Massimiliano Casavecchia and Stefania Gambirasio, we had visited in Ravenna the crypt of the Church of Santa Maria in Porto. That underground chamber where monks were once buried struck us as the right place to insert the shades of Dante and Virgil in the eighth chamber of the eighth circle of Hell. It was there, with the kind permission of Father Lukanowski, that we shot the first part of the film. The second part, with the flames, was shot on the stage of Teatro Rasi, formerly the Church of Saint Clare, dating to the 13th century, where we imagine Dante, a Franciscan, must have regularly attended mass. Ermanna discovered the “voice & figure” of Ulysses: the intimate, stunning tone of a soul consumed by fire, transforming the entire space into a mirror of flame; and a diaphanous body, both carnal and transparent, that renders the ungraspable manifestation of that voice, revealing itself as it slips away.

Marco Martinelli

Ermanna Montanari (actress, author and set designer) and Marco Martinelli (playwright and director) founded the Teatro delle Albe (1983) and share its artistic direction. For her original itinerary of vocal research, Ermanna Montanari has received acknowledgements in Ital y and all over the world. S he’s the founder and director - together with Enrico Pitozzi - of MALAGOLA, I nternational C enter for the Vocal and Sound Research , based in Ravenna (awarded with Premio Ubu 2022 for the Special Projects).

Marco Martinelli’s texts have been published and staged in ten languages, and he has been awarded with several prizes in Italy and all over the world. He is founder of the Teatro delle Albe’s non - school, a theatre - educational practice with adolescents, which has become a focal po int for many scholars and which Martinelli has taken all over Italy and the world.

Frank Hentschker, Currently executive director and director of programs at the Segal Center, Hentschker has transformed the center into the nation’s leading forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies; each year, he curates and produces more than forty events—staged readings, lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress, and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries, and emerging voices in the international, American, and New York theatre scenes.

Jan. 24, 2023 6:00 pm

Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò
New York University
24 West 12th Street
(btw 5th and 6th Ave)
New York, NY 10011

The Sky over Kibera

screening (Documentary, Italy, 2019, 43 min.)
Q&A moderated by Stefano Albertini with Ermanna Montanari, Marco Martinelli
more info + General RSVP and Casa Italiana’s Member Reservation here